Stress is a natural human response to pressure when faced with threatening or challenging situations. A certain level of stress is normal, and can be beneficial in enabling people to achieve peak performance. The human body should revert back to its normal state after a certain period of time, following a stress-inducing experience. However, this reversion to normal can be suppressed when individuals are subjected to frequent or repetitive stressful situations. Long-lasting or overwhelming stress can have a negative impact upon human health, wellbeing, relationships, work and general enjoyment of life.
Extended or heightened levels of stress are associated with anxiety, depression, psychosomatic illness, suppressed immunity, general losses of energy and productivity, and other associated health problems. In the workplace, this results in increases in absenteeism and presenteeism. Safe Work Australia estimated the cost of work-related stress during 2008 and 2009 at around A$5.3 billion annually. US studies of the economic impact of stress, at around the turn of the century, variously estimated costs of between US$200 to US$300 billion annually.
Trained health care professionals are able to identify typical symptoms of stress-related problems. However, the signs of excessive stress are often undetected by the affected individual until the psychological and physical health impacts have become significant. Furthermore, although employers, health insurers, and society more broadly could achieve significant economic and social benefits from early detection and management of stress, the tools available to enable personal or corporate management and monitoring of stress levels, other than through regular appointments with trained health care professionals, are extremely limited.
Self-assessment methods, typically based upon questionnaires, have been developed to assist individuals in monitoring and managing their mental health. For example, the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), originally developed in 1967 by Holmes and Rahe, comprises a list of 43 stressful life events that can contribute to adverse health outcomes. However, the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale identifies only the individual's exposure to stress based upon the experience of recent major life events. Questionnaires directed to assessment of a current mood state of an individual, such as the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS), developed at the University of New South Wales, are based upon a subjective assessment of mood, and are better suited to distinguishing between different mental health conditions, but are not able to monitor, on a day-to-day basis, differences between stress levels that have not yet progressed significantly towards more serious conditions.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to develop new methods and systems for monitoring and managing stress levels that can be self-administered by an individual, supported in the workplace, are objective, and are able to differentiate between different levels of stress, to enable early identification of emerging problems.
The present invention has been devised in order to address these requirements.